There is a trend toward creating more immersive experiences, which in effect often entail creating experiences which involve a larger number or more of one's senses. At least a couple of examples include surround sound, wide screen displays, and the incorporation of vibratory effects. However in order to convey a more immersive experience, the experience will often involve a more complex set of signals having a larger number of components, which in turn require an increasing amount of network bandwidth and device output resolution, when the set of signals for creating the experience are conveyed between devices.
Enhancements in at least some experiences, such as multimedia experiences and/or gaming are increasingly including greater complexities in audio, video and haptics, which are principally experienced as part of previously authored or one-way content for rendering or play back on a target device, or where the interaction within the framework of the content presentation is largely scripted. However, as of yet, adoption of corresponding effects in two-way, i.e. user-to-user, communications has been extremely slow and/or largely non-existent. This may be attributable at least in part to the differences in the rendering capabilities of different end user devices and lack of a framework within which increasingly multi-modal experiences can be readily created and composed.
The present inventors have recognized that the creation and encoding of multi-modal content can be further facilitated by establishing a vocabulary of standard predefined effects in the form of tokens, which can be used to minimize the amount of information needed in creating, and subsequently communicating an effect, which can then be mapped, and scaled if necessary, to effect producing elements in a particular device.